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Page 1
1
RECOLLECTIONSOF A FALLEN
SKY:
VELIKOVSKY AND
CULTURAL AMNESIA
Papers presented at the University of
Lethbridge
May 9 and 10, 1974
Edited by
E.R. MILTON
Page 2
2
Notes on the printed version of the book
Cover - Painting was made prior to the publication of Worlds in
Collision, the work of a 30 year old Canadian male who utilized
painting and drawing as an aspect of his therapy for neurosis.
The artist shows the earth, identified by the lines of latitude and
longitude in a rather unusual view. Seen from outer space, it
appears to be flooded since the normal land masses are missing
or submerged and the patient stands on an island reaching
upwards, perhaps in distress. Above the earth is what appears
to be a mass of land with mountains, river, perhaps a continent
hovering in the air, To the left is an oddly shaped spherical
mass, the moon, or perhaps a meteorite. The patient described
that large continental mass above as a sheet of ice. Courtesy of
Professor John McGregor-
The responsibility for producing the volume of papers
presented at the symposium: Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia,
May 9 and 10, 1974, was delegated to an editorial committee
consisting of the following members of the Faculty of the
University of Lethbridge:
Earl R. Milton
Chairman, Department of Physics
and Chairman of the Committee
Paul D. Lewis
Department of Biological Science
Laurie R. Ricou
Chairman, Department of English
Ian Q. Whishaw
Department of Psychology
Copyright 1978 The University of Lethbridge All rights
reserved
e
xcepting the Right of the Individual Authors to
reproduce in any form their contributions to this volume.
Afterword, Address to the Chancellor's Dinner, Address to the
Convocation Dinner are Copyright 1978 by Immanuel
Velikovsky. Permission to reproduce granted by the Velikovsky
Estate.
Page 3
3
CONTENTS
Foreword
Earl R. Milton
*****
Cultural Amnesia: The Submergence of
Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory
and Their Later Emergence
Immanuel Velikovsky
*****
Palaetiology of Fear and Memory
Alfred de Grazia
*****
Psychological Aspects of the Work
of Immanuel Velikovsky
John MacGregor
*****
Structuring the Apocalypse:
Old and New World Variations
William Mullen
*****
Shakespeare and Velikovsky:
Catastrophic Theory and the
Springs of Art
Irving Wolfe
*****
Page 4
4
Catastrophism and Uniformity:
A Probe into the Origins of the
1832 Gestalt Shift in Geology
George Grinnell
*****
Catastrophism as a World View
Patrick Doran
*****
Afterword
Immanuel Velikovsky
APPENDICES
I. About the Authors
II. Honourary Degree Awareded to Immanual Velikovsky
III. Addresses to the Chancellor's Dinner
IV. Address to the Convocation Dinner
(
Immanuel Velikovsky
)
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FOREWORD
On Saturday afternoon 11 May 1974, the University of
Lethbridge conferred upon Immanuel Velikovsky the honourary
degree of Doctor of Arts and Science in recognition of the
interdisciplinary nature of his scholarship. In awarding this
degree the University was recognizing a world famous scholar
whose work epitomizes the ideology of the University: that
interdisciplinary studies have value.
For two day preceding the convocation ceremony, the University
was host to an international symposium which attracted
delegates from the Pacific Northwestern region of the United
States and from six Canadian provinces. This Symposium, with
the theme Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, examined aspects
of Velikovsky's synthesis centering on the Humanities and
Social Sciences.
The papers presented in this volume are revised versions of the
papers originally presented at the Symposium and from the first
collection of papers on the subject of cultural Amnesia since
Velikovsky introduced the topic in Worlds in Collision [1]. The
papers have been examined by other experts in the field con-
cerned, criticisms were collected, and the authors were allowed
to make minor changes in the hope that a more accomplished
volume could be produced.
Since Dr. Velikovsky's addresses to the Symposium were
delivered without notes, and because of Dr. Velikovsky's
weakening health in the months following the Symposium, he
was not asked to submit written versions of his contributions.
Instead, his papers were produced from the tape recordings of
the Symposium sessions. After editing them for clarity, the
transcriptions were revised by Dr. Velikovsky for publication
here.
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Although the papers all relate to some aspect of Cultural Amne-
sia, they deal with subjects as diverse as anthropology, geology,
narrative art, and psychiatry. While the task of showing rela-
tionships between them is desirable, it is difficult. It is may hope
that the interpretation presented here, with which the authors
might not agree, will stimulate readers to consider carefully the
papers and their relation to Cultural Amnesia.
In his address, Dr Velikovsky elaborates upon his theory of
Cultural Amnesia. According to his theory, mankind forgot
about unpleasant catastrophic events on the conscious level, but
remembers on the unconscious level. Furthermore it would
appear that the unconscious memory is transmitted genetically
from one generation to the next, a concept already postulated by
Freud and Jung but in disagreement with much of the current
biological thinking. Nevertheless, there are, as will be shown in
the papers following Velikovsky's, substantial reasons for
thinking that memory is indeed transmitted, if not racially, then
in some other way.
If the cultural amnesia theory is correct, then it is possible to
suggest that every generation lives in a state of trauma induced
by the conflict between subconscious memories of past cata-
strophic events and the refusal of the conscious mind to recog-
nize that these events actually occurred in prehistoric and
historic times. Dr. Velikovsky believes that the trauma is re-
sponsible for mankind's aggressive hostility, a concept of impor-
tance to every individual frightened by the prospect of thermo-
nuclear war or of the instability which seems to be increasing in
society.
Moreover, the trauma is also responsible for the inability and at
times the outright refusal of science to recognize the overwhelm-
ing evidence pointing to the catastrophic past of the Earth and
the entire solar System. The trauma is also responsible, in part at
least, for the actions of some scientists who denounced Veli-
kovsky without even reading his work. Perhaps the men who did
this really are saying that the truth is too awful; if the public
knew they would be furious, and the great prestige accorded to
the leading spokespersons for modern science would decline.
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The second paper in this volume, authored by Alfred de Grazia,
discusses the origin of fear. De Grazia is an internationally
recognized expert in politics and social systems. He became
aware of Velikovsky because of the efforts made by Livio
Stecchini, a professor of ancient history. Stecchini had tried to
interest de Grazia not in the substance of Velikovsky's theories
but in the political ramifications of the attack by the scientific
community on Velikovsky. Shortly thereafter, de Grazia read
Velikovsky's last book Oedipus and Akhnaton [2] and judged it
to be "a fundamental contribution to classical history and
archaeology." [3] He then decided to meet with Velikovsky and
investigate the issue.
A change for the better occurred in Velikovsky's fortunes when
de Grazia devoted the entire September 1963 issue of the
American Behavioral Scientist to aspects of the hostile reaction
of the scientific community to Velikovsky's revolutionary
cosmology.
While preparing the special issue on Velikovsky [4], de Grazia
became interested in the substance of Velikovsky's theories, an
interest which has culminated in several investigations into the
origins of human nature and the development of human
institutions. A part of that work in included here.
De Grazia maintains that fear is ubiquitous in its influence upon
the behaviour of mankind. Partly it is animalian, partly cultural.
It pervades all social institutions. Memory is created by fear, a
specific case of which is fear of catastrophe. Events recorded in
memory will be forgotten when the need to function sanely
overrides the need to remember. Thus primal fears, which exist
in memory because of terrors experienced directly or
historically, are suppressed in the interest of day to day
functioning of the organism.
In the next paper, John MacGregor outlines psychological
aspects of the work done by Immanuel Velikovsky. MacGregor,
an art historian and psychotherapist, has applied psychiatry to
the study of art. His paper is the result of the work done to
clarify the views of Freud and Jung on the possibility of inherited
transmission of memories. MacGregor examines dreams which
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have cosmic content; patients often express inner disturbance in
symbolism involving cosmic catastrophe. Although the dreams
refer specifically to events in the patient's inner reality, the
reason why a patient projects an inner crisis in terms of
catastrophes in outer space is not always evident; it is possible
that some of these dreams cannot be explained in terms of
personal memories in which case they may be evidence for racial
memories imprinted during past global cataclysms experienced
by mankind.
The fourth paper, by William Mullen, compares apocalyptic
writings from the Old and New World. These writings suggest
that society is restructured after a catastrophe. The survivors
seek stability through worship of what they think is an
appropriate deity and through ritual activities. When another
apocalypse is imminent, a new religion emerges or old religions
are altered in an attempt to avert the impending disaster. Mullen
shows how a catastrophe which occurred in the distant past
becomes, because of religion, an apocalypse which will occur in
the future.
Where Mullen has discussed catastrophe as it is expressed
through religion, the next paper, by Irving Wolfe, proposes that
catastrophic experiences are the inspiration for great works of
narrative art, in particular Wolfe discusses Velikovskian over-
tones in two of Shakespeare's plays. Through narrative art,
catastrophes may be discussed and examined without the society
(composed of individuals) having to experience the traumas
associated with enduring, but repressed, memories of the actual
events. As "adult fairy tales" such narratives provide a way to
imply a rational order to an otherwise irrational universe, thereby
diminishing apprehension about the uncontrollable aspects of
nature. The response of the individual to such literature also can
be understood in terms of the harmonizing effect of that
literature also upon the subconscious needs of the individual for
comfort. Neither the author nor the reader nor the audience can
admit that there is an anxiety in need of comfort but that it
seems, is shy the work endures partly because it soothes a
hidden fear.
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George Grinnell, once a geologist and now an historian of
science at McMaster University, shows how science has been
altered to preclude all mention or examination of catastrophic
disruptions. In the same sense in which the Egyptian rituals of
the Old Kingdom, described earlier by Mullen, were designed to
ensure a stable society, Grinnell shows how geological language
was changed in the nineteenth century to provide a stable
philosophical basis for the liberal movement which controlled
urbanized industrial society in Britain. After a century of use, the
new language is scientific dogma. To discuss anything other than
evolutionary processes now requires that even the language of
science be modified. It is not surprising then, within professional
scientific circles, that little or no credence is placed upon
attempts to introduce disruptive or revolutionary processes as
part of everyday happenings in the Universe. Grinnell however
ascribes their exclusion to immediate political expediency rather
than to the wishes of scientists to forge dreadful catastrophes of
the past. If Grinnell is correct, the violent emotional response of
contemporary scientists to revolutionary hypotheses still requires
explanation, especially in a world where political liberalism is
declining.
The eighth and final paper, by Patrick Doran, examines life after
a cataclysm. Assuming that western-industrial society has
already produced an apocalypse for mankind, Doran suggests
that realization of the catastrophe must emerge into
consciousness before survival can be assured. In this case
survival depends upon rejuvenation of earth's fragile
bioenvironment. Like Mullen, Doran then deals with how a
society recovers from catastrophe. He claims that the joy
induced by realizing that one is a survivor is the key to freedom
from the buried fears of catastrophes long past. The acceptance
of Velikovsky's cosmology by western civilization is a first step
to freedom from the despair induced by a crisis laden World.
The World has been changed in the cataclysm; those who know
they have survived now have the chance to redirect civilization
to ensure continued survival.
In closing the Symposium, Dr. Velikovsky reminded those
present that understanding mankind's traumatic past is the key to
understanding the seemingly irrational motives behind the
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contemporary behaviour of men. In summarizing his scientific
and historical contributions, Dr. Velikovsky noted the response
of scholars to his work and to the evidence supporting it, and
pleaded for younger minds to carry on and complete the
revolution started three and one-half decades ago.
It is my duty to report that two of the participants at the
Symposium chose not to submit manuscripts for publication;
therefore their papers are not included here [5]. These
unfortunate decisions may reflect concern for the hostility
exhibited by the scholarly community toward any works which
deal with Velikovsky and his theories.
The question I ask is, why do the issues by Velikovsky invoke
an immediate emotional response in the more conventionally-
minded scholars of the academy? The answer in part seems to
arise from the division of scholars in general (and scientists in
particular) in to two broad and quite mutually exclusive groups,
which I will describe, for want of better term, as evolutionists
and revolutionists.
The majority group, the evolutionists, believe that we live, at a
special moment, the pinnacle of creation, the end result of
several billion years of gradual development wherein Homo
Sapiens has achieved dominion over planet Earth and through
technology has finally achieved understanding, albeit
incomplete, of the rest of nature. This could be described as the
centre or liberal view of the universe. Believers in this viewpoint
live in a world where events are, in general, fully predictable,
hence a rational planned life is possible. Occasional upheavals,
described as Acts of God, mar the otherwise tranquil world from
time to time, but afterwards the Universe resumes the normal
process of unfolding as it should.
The other group, the revolutionists, to which Velikovsky and his
supporters belong, believe that the history of the World, and of
the Universe, is best described in terms of a series of abrupt
large-scale and intensive changes in nature and life with periods
of slow evolution in between [6]. Physical evidence of such
changes is found in Earth's geological strata and on the exposed
surface of the planets.
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For the revolutionists the task is to re-interpret the evidence
which has been described in the scientific and historical litera-
ture in terms of the evolutionary model, a project to which the
evolutionists usually react with intense hostility.
To rewrite the literature in such a manner that it is freed of
conclusions which are only valid if the evolutionary model is
correct appears to be a difficult task, though in reality it may not
be. The correctness of such conclusions really depends upon the
validity of a small number of physical theories. By showing that
these theories can be sustained only by making unwarranted
assumptions, the evolutionary viewpoint is undermined. The
foundation removed, the data can be re-analyzed possibly
producing different conclusions. In astronomy the long-time
stability of the solar system is a key theory which recently has
been questioned by Bass [7]; even the nature of gravitation itself
if still in doubt [8].
In geology and biology the currently adopted time scale depends
upon the decay of long-lived radioactive atoms. The possibility
that radioactive decays are environmentally induced has recently
been proposed [9]. Without radiometric dating the rampant
inflation in the magnitude of the cosmic timescale over the last
century [10] will undoubtedly enter a sharp period of regression.
This question will be debated in detail in time; for the present it
is sufficient to say that if radioactive decay processes are not
invariant, then many problems facing Velikovsky will vanish.
The end result might well be a widespread reconsideration of
Velikovsky's revised chronology. Similarly, if the cosmic time
scale is drastically shortened, then the physical history of the
Earth and Solar System will have to change.
In the interim, astronomical confirmations of Velikovsky's ad-
vance claims [11] are viewed with suspicion by those believing
in the evolutionary viewpoint.
As an example of an advance claim I shall cite Velikovsky's
descriptions of Saturn. In the keynote address Velikovsky refers
to a nova-like explosion on Saturn [12] which occurred long
before the events described in Worlds in Collision. In closing the
Symposium Velikovsky notes how scientist and engineers will
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not deny that Jupiter's magnetic field must influence other
bodies moving through it [13]. Having concluded that Saturn
once exploded, Velikovsky has predicted that Saturn will be
found to emit low energy cosmic rays [14]. Pioneer 10 has
recently measured the magnetic tail of Jupiter at the orbit of
Saturn [15]. Saturn enters Jupiter's magnetic tail every twenty
years, at these encounters Velikovsky predicted an enhancement
of cosmic radiation's arriving at Earth from Saturn [16]. A
similar prediction has been made by an unidentified writer in
Sky and Telescope who claims that the Jupiter tail encounter
with Saturn's outer radiation belts could produce disturbances
detectable by radio antennas aboard passing spacecraft [17].
Synchroton radiation emitted by the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and
Uranus has been detected and cosmic ray sources have now
been associated with these planets.
Velikovsky's contention that Saturn recently erupted is
supported by evidence that Saturn, like Jupiter, emits more
energy than it receives from the sun [18]. The usual explanation
for this excess is the escape of primordial energy from the
planet. Why the excess still exists after billions of years is not
obvious. Again the difference between Velikovsky and the
evolutionists is a time factor: the difference between 4000 years
and 4000 million years. While such great differences seemingly
cannot be reconciled easily, the reader is cautioned to remember
that the time difference depends upon the correctness of
assumptions made in applying theories based upon an
evolutionary model to the data. Usually assumptions are being
made because no proof is possible. Accepted assumptions
represent the current consensus of opinions put forth by the
scientific establishment [19].
The thoroughness of Velikovsky's scholarship is beyond
question; his main heresy is to question the evolutionary view
and to champion a recently forgotten revolutionary viewpoint20
and his contention that electric and magnetic forces play an
important role in the Universe. Consideration of Velikovsky's
cosmology as a possible reality restores to its rightful place an
old method of describing the cosmos; a method which had, at
least in part, become inconvenient for political reasons [21].
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The question explored here is how could the revolutionary world
view be forgotten by mankind and why does its re-emergence
invoke such an emotional response from the believers of the
currently popular evolutionary world view. Glimpses of these
answers, I believe, are contained in the papers that follow.
Together they are an important statement relevant to the question
of the validity of Velikovsky's revolutionary cosmology.
The fact that this Symposium took place at the seven-year-old
University of Lethbridge and the fact that the University granted
an honourary degree in Arts and Science to Dr. Velikovsky,
generally regarded as a heretic, and even as an outcast by a few
misguided individuals, are extraordinary events which warrant
explanation:
I believe that two factors allowed the supporters of Velikovsky
to be successful at Lethbridge in their attempt to have him
awarded an honourary degree for academic reasons.
First and foremost there was the intense dedication of those
persons working to document the case for granting Velikovsky's
degree. Without their enthusiasm, nothing would have been
accomplished.
Second, in a small university the lines of communication are
short. When the case for Velikovsky was presented to the
General Faculties Council of the University, those voting on the
matter were friendly with those supporting Velikovsky. When
one is sufficiently informed about an issue it is hard to oppose
known and trusted colleagues with good academic credentials.
The isolation which normally prevents frequent communication
between members of different departments is minimized at
Lethbridge, as all are in one large and long building. Given our
size and the common cause, daily contacts in the corridors,
cafeteria, or library became more than occasions for passing
social discourse; they became occasions for the exchange of
ideas. This was a precious period in the intellectual growth of
this University, especially for those intimately involved in the
debate.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the effort of the editorial commit-
tee: Paul D. Lewis, Jr.; Laurie R. Ricou, and Ian Q. Whishaw,
who diligently refereed the papers, and helped otherwise with
the publication of this volume. I appreciate the help of my wife,
Joan, my secretary, Mrs. Elly Boumans, and Stan Heller, for
their diligence in proofreading the final manuscript and Proofs.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the members of the
committee which planned the Symposium; they are including
myself, Lynne Pohle, Don Thompson, lan Q. Whishaw, and
most importantly, the chairman of the committee the man to
whose memory this volume is dedicated, my close friend and
greatly missed colleague, the late John T. Hamilton.
For his contribution to the Symposium I want to convey thanks
from many delegates to the chairman, W. J. Cousins, Emeritus
Professor of History. Throughout he directed the proceeding
with fairness, introducing levity when the occasion called for it,
but always maintaining decorum, especially where a chairman
with lesser experience might have faltered.
Notwithstanding all of the acknowledgements above some
persons who have rendered valuable assistance have been
overlooked. To these persons I offer apology and thanks.
It is with gratitude that I acknowledge, for the University, the
financial support awarded by the Canada Council, which in part
paid the expenses of the scholars invited to address the Cultural
Amnesia Symposium.
As well, special thanks are due to the senior academic adminis-
trators of the University, President William E. Beckel and Vice-
President Owen G. Holmes, who from the very beginning
supported this honourary degree and the concept of a
symposium, who offered personal support and who committed
University funds not only for the Symposium but also to ensure
that this volume would be published, and could be sold at a
reasonable price.
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For me it has been a privilege to work with the authors preparing
this volume. Several of them have extended much appreciated
personal courtesy, warm hospitality and stimulating discussion
during my visits to their homes and institutions both with respect
to the revision of their papers and in the wider pursuit of our
mutual interest in revolutionary genesis.
I want to recognize the debt I owe to Philip Connolly for the
wise counsel he has rendered concerning decisions I had to
make on the format and contents of this volume. His critical
remarks on the editing have assisted me greatly.
Lastly, but with special emphasis, I must thank my secretary
Mrs. Elly Boumans who persevered and worked very closely
with me both in the difficult job of transcribing the tape
recordings of the Symposium (in view of their technical content
which discouraged others who tried to help), and in typing and
proofreading of the several drafts of the manuscript while the
editorial committee and the authors negotiated the final form.
Without her dedication this volume would not be complete
today.
E. R. Milton,
Department of Physics
The University of Lethbridge
October 1977
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Notes (Foreword)
1.
Velikovsky World in Collision, (Doubleday, 1950), See-
part 2, Chapter 6, pages 298f (Pocket Books, 1977) pages 302f;
(Abacus, 1972) pages 286f. The pagination in the now out-of-
print but widely distributed Laurel edition (Dell,1967) is
identical to that in the Pocket Books edition. The pagination in
the earlier Delta edition (Dell, 1965) is identical to that in the
more recent Abacus edition, see ahead, footnote 3, page 21.
2.
Doubleday (1960).
3.
Press Conference, The University of Lethbridge, 8 May
1974.
4.
The contents of this issue eventually were expanded to
become the book The Velikovsky Affair, (University Book,
1965).
5.
Both papers are reviewed in the periodical Pensee 4(5):47
(Winter 1974/75) published by the Student Academic Freedom
Forum, Portland, Oregon. As well, both of these papers are
included in the recorded proceedings of the Symposium. A set of
nine recorded cassette tapes of the entire Symposium is available
from the University Library. Inquiries as to the current purchase
price for the set of tapes should be directed to the University
Library Media Distribution Centre.
6.
There is an increased awareness in scientific circles,
particularly in the sciences, that not all data can be fitted to the
existing theories which utilize only evolutionary process. For
simplicity, most mathematical models of nature use linear system
of equations, despite much evidence that many natural
phenomena are clearly non-linear in behaviour. Discrepancies
from linearity are in general, handled by introducing perturbing-
terms into the equations or by postulating local-anomalies in the
specific environment under discussion. Recently, Rene Thom
has produced a catastrophe-theory which allows abrupt
discontinuous changes to be introduced into otherwise slowly
evolving systems. Doing so allows connection to be made
between unconnected and differing sequences of behaviour for
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an evolving system which seemingly exhibits markedly different
behaviour in the present from that recorded in the past. A
consequence of Thom's theory is that extrapolation of behaviour
over many orders of magnitude, either in time or in quantity is
inherently dangerous. An example is found in certain
mechanically stable system which can unexpectedly undergo
catastrophic breakdown, yet no apparent explanation for the
breakdown can be found by extrapolating from the initial
conditions. See : Montgomery, M., "Why Gondolas Derail",
Boston Globe, 17 April 1976, page 32. Thom's theory is
summarized in two recent articles published in New Scientist;
see : Stewart, "The Seven Elementary Catastrophes", 68:447-
454 (20 November 1975); and Walgate, "Rene Thom Clears Up
Catastrophes", 68:578(4 December 1975).
7.
Bass Robert, "Did Worlds Collide?" Pensee 4(3):8-20
(Summer 1974); "Proofs" of the Stability of the Solar System,
op.cit., pages 21-26.
8.
The inability of Einstein to unify the gravitational field
(general relativity) with the electromagnetic field (special
relativity) may arise because the two fields are different de-
scriptions of a single interaction. Until the nature of gravitation is
realized, progress can be expected to be slow in finding a
physical mechanism for Velikovsky's cosmology.
9.
Dudley, H. C. "Phenomenological Causal Model Of
Nuclear Decay, Assuming interaction with Neutrino Sea,
"Lettere, Nuovo Cimento, 5(3):231-232 (16 September 1972);
Anderson, John, and Spangler, G. W. "Radioactive Dating: Is
the Decay Constant Really Constant?", Pensee 4(4) : 31-33 (Fall
1974).
10.
Engle, A.E.J. "Time and the Earth" American Scientist
57:458-483 (Winter 1969) see pages 460f.
11.
Dr. Velikovsky prefers to use the term `advance claim'
rather than prediction.
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12.
See ahead, Velikovsky, Cultural Amnesia: The
Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and
Their Later Emergence, page 21.
13.
See ahead, Velikovsky, Afterword, page 149.
14.
Velikovsky, "H.H. Hess and my Memoranda" Pensee
2(3) 22-29 (Fall 1972) see particularly page 28 Saturn from the
Memo to Hess dated 11 September 1973.
15.
"Dimensions of Jupiter's Magnetic Tail Believed
Enormous" NASA News Release 76-55.
16.
Velikovsky Copyrighted lecture 5 November 1962. Are
Cosmic Rays Emitted by Saturn?
17.
News notes: Jupiter's Magnetic Tail , "Sky and telescope
51(5):375 (may 1976).
18.
The measured thermal excess of Saturn is greater by a
factor of two over solar insolation. Reported by L.J. Caroff at
the Northwest astronomy Conference Victoria B.C., 1975.
19.
In astronomy ten thousand galaxies can be counted but
astronomers apply theories to infer that one billion galaxies exist
in the universe; thus there are about one hundred thousand
unobserved galaxies for every one that we observe directly. A
similar factor exists between stars that can be counted on
photographs and the total number of stars believed to exist
within our galaxy.
To alter the time scale of the universe by an equal factor would
bring events of one billion years ago into the last lce Age and
events from the beginning of the Age of Mammals into the
Christian Era.
Urey has proposed that collisions between Earth and comets
occur from time to time. Such collision may explain massive
animal extinction which accompanied breaks in the geological
record. See Urey "Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods",
Nature 242:32-33 (2 March 1973). That Urey, explicitly
contemptuous of Velikovsky, can bring a comet to collide with
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Earth millions of year ago, while Velikovsky cannot propose that
a similar collision occurred thousands of years ago leads me to
wonder if the recency of suggested events is proportional to their
capability to produce discomfort in the evolutionist's mind: even
catastrophic events if in the distant past are acceptable.
Alteration of the timescale by de-evolutionizing the assumptions
can bring cataclysmic events currently ascribed to the distant
past into the historical period and thus to the time when the
cataclysms may well have occurred and been recorded.
20.
Stecchini, "The inconstant Heavens: Velikovsky in
Relation to some Past cosmic Perplexities", American
Behavioral Scientist 7:19-35, 43-44 (September 1963), see
especially pages 22-27. This paper also appears in de Grazia,
Juergens, and Stecchini, editors of The Velikovsky Affair
(University Books 1966).
21.
See ahead Grinnell, Catastrophism and Uniformity.
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1
CULTURAL AMNESIA
The Submergence of Terrifying Events
in the Racial Memory and their Later Emergence
Immanuel Velikovsky
I thank you Dr. Holmes for the introduction. My comments
tonight consist of informal remarks on material that I cover in a
systematic fashion in the book that I am writing. This book,
Mankind in Amnesia
, elaborates upon new aspects that follow
from my other published works [1].
CATASTROPHES
In Worlds in Collision I describe two series of catastrophic
events: The first took place in the middle of the second
millennium before the present era, the second in the eighth
century before the present era. The last of these catastrophic
events occurred on 23 March -686 [2]. Fortunately, men were
not illiterate at the time of these catastrophes.
One of the first clues as to what had happened I discovered in a
book written over one hundred years ago, by a French
missionary who worked in Canada, but who wrote about
Mexico, C.E. Brasseur de Bourbourg [3]. He wrote several
books on the subject of ancient Mexican beliefs and ancient
Mexican history. He also wrote a small book investigating
possible connections between Egyptian and Mexican beliefs.
When I read Brasseur's books on the ancient history of Mexico I
found it strange that he, being a clergyman, did not observe, or
did not dare to report that in the Scriptures many pages deal with
the very same events he was describing. He reported that
cataclysmic events had been found in Mexican lore, events also
described by several Spanish historians of the sixteenth century.
These were events of great violence. Mountains rose and moved;
many volcanoes erupted from the North-Pacific Coast of North
America all the way to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of
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South America. The ocean rose like a wall and moved,
accompanied by terrific winds. Fiery bodies were seen fighting
in the sky. Stones descended from above, followed by rains of
naphtha. Men were maddened by the din and the paramount
danger. Houses collapsed and were carried away, hurricanes tore
out great trees of whole forests with their roots. If such a great
catastrophe occurred today, what impression would it leave in
the survivors?
The catastrophe of the second millennium has been remembered
on very many pages of the Biblical Prophets and the Psalms. Our
whole life is pervaded by influences originating in these and
other catastrophic events that took place in earlier ages. The
catastrophes survive in the liturgy still used today, only we
choose not to examine them as such. Whatever area of life we
select to explore we find some vestige of the terrifying events of
the past. The calendar is a good example, either the Jewish
calendar or the Christian calendar or that of any other creed.
Throughout the year the holidays are reflections of catastrophic
events. The midwinter holiday celebrated as either Christmas or
Hanukkah, the Week of Light, is a renewal of the Roman
Saturnalia. If you read about the Roman Saturnalia you
recognize immediately almost all of the rites of Hanukkah or
Christmas, now celebrated at the end of December. They
commemorate events of the days when the planet Saturn
exploded into a nova, long before the events that I describe in
Worlds in Collision,
Seven days before the Universal Deluge
began, the solar system became illuminated as brilliantly as if by
a hundred suns. In the Deluge, not only the Earth but also other
planets of the solar system were engulfed. Nature was wanton:
the destruction was great, Mars, Mercury, and the Moon, as the
space pictures now reveal, became flying cemeteries. Nothing
living remained, although probably there was once life on those
planets its destruction was complete. In comparison, the Earth
fared well and thus mankind could call itself the "Chosen
People": not because all men survived, not because there was no
destruction; in fact there was decimation, even extinction of
whole genera, and massive mutations, caused mainly by cosmic
rays and X-rays emitted by Saturn. Subsequent to the Deluge an
environment was created on Earth in which life could not only
exist, but could flourish, with an abundance of water, a change
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of climate with changed seasons, with a magnetosphere now
giving protection from cosmic rays and an ionosphere giving
protection from ultraviolet rays. The new orbit the Earth circled
was not too close to the Sun, not too far from it, a climate unlike
that of Mars (too cold) or Venus (too hot).
The Universal Deluge was not the first catastrophe to decimate
life on our Earth: other calamities preceded it, Dim memories
from these more ancient times survive in mythology. Before the
age of Kronos (Saturn's "Golden Age") there was the age of
Ouranos [4], Egyptian myths of great antiquity relate stories of
battles and changes in the sky and of vast destruction on Earth,
changes that we neglect to investigate and know in our desire to
believe that we live on a planet that is stable and safe.
AMNESIA
The phenomenon of racial amnesia occupied Freud's mind in the
last decades of his life, in fact it became his obsession.
Initially Freud claimed that the impressions made upon a child's
mind dictate the child's future and cause also neuroses in
juvenile and adult life. Later Freud reversed his thesis and
claimed that man's destiny is triggered by images which exist
within the racial memory, deep within the unconscious mind.
From psychoanalytic studies we know that a traumatic
experience, either of a physical or psychological nature, leaves a
strong vestige deep within the human soul. Such vestiges are in
the heritage that comes to us from antiquity. They are found in
most of the written documents that survive from the civilizations
of the past; from Mexico, China, Iceland, Iran, India, Sumeria,
Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Judea. They also survive from
traditions carried from generation to generation, by word of
mouth, in races that do not know how to write. These latter
traditions eventually are written down by anthropologists, who
collect together stories of catastrophes from north and south,
from west and east, from Lapland and the South Sea islands. We
ask why we do not recognize this evidence the vestiges of which
exist within the souls of men, The answer is that because these
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vestiges are buried so deeply we are unable to see the evidence
before us.
The story is repeated in the records of the stones and bones
uncovered at every latitude and longitude.
Chief Mountain [5], that you can see from here, was once
overturned. The fossils that belong near Chief Mountain's
summit are found at its base. The Matterhorn in the Alps has
been moved to its present location northward from Lombardy
and overturned. In several different places in the Bible you can
find verses describing mountains moving or overthrown. Such
biblical verses appeared even to fundamentalists as metaphoric
expressions. Today many theologians prefer to regard the Old
Testament as a book of poetry rather than what it seemingly is.
The inability to see evidence which is clearly written down and
evidence so clearly presented by nature is a psychological
phenomenon. Because the evidence was so clear, it was not
necessary for me to look far to find it. When I started to collect
the material for Worlds in Collision it was not the scarcity of
material but its abundance that was my impediment. I was able
to use but a small fraction of what exists in the surviving
literature.
Amnesia is one of the defense reactions of man. Those who
immediately survived did not necessarily become victims of
amnesia, though this may have occurred. We know the effects of
battle-shock on soldiers. it is likely that the ,larger amnesia took
some time to develop.
In the older Greek authors, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics, you
find definite statements indicating that catastrophes which
occurred in the history of the human race and in the history of
our Earth were not abnormal events, they were actually
dominant, repeating themselves again and again. But from the
historical records we see that the knowledge of the catastrophes
disappeared slowly into oblivion.
Plato described cataclysms in several works: he wrote about
worlds destroyed and rebuilt. In his Timaeus he noted that the
Greeks do not remember ancient catastrophes, besides the
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Deluge. He adds that the people of his time, as the priests of Sais
told Solon, were unable to remember these catastrophic events.
in another work, whose authorship is probably wrongly ascribed
to Plato, he is presented as believing in a peaceful universe.
Plato's pupil Aristotle refused to believe in catastrophes. The
scholarly world has accepted Aristotle's view that the planets
can never change their motions. He, more than anyone else is
responsible for the continuing belief that we live in a safe world,
on a planet to which nothing like collisions can happen. Aristotle
argued that those who believe in celestial catastrophes should be
brought to trial, and if convicted, punished by death.
In the first century before the present era Lucretius knows of,
and writes about these catastrophes and their terror. Cicero, like
Aristotle, denies the possibility of the planets changing their
orbits and advocates that people believing this should be brought
to court and severely punished.
ARMAGEDDON
At the beginning of the Christian era, or in the century before it,
mankind awaited another catastrophe. This catastrophe was
expected because seven hundred years had separated the last
series of upheavals of the eighth-seventh centuries from the one
of the fifteenth century. This expectation created an
eschatological literature and the appearance of Messiahs. The
Book of Revelation is one of the great books of this
eschatological literature. The end of the world is painted with the
experience of the past serving as a model. Look at
Michelangelo's
The Last
Judgement
. Sadism
is as predominant
as masochism in this Christian description of the events of the
Last Day. The catastrophe, the Last Day, has now been
transferred into the sky, into heaven, but not an astronomical
heaven; these are different heavens. In reality Michelangelo is
painting events already described by the prophets Isaiah, Joel,
Amos, and Micah, who lived during the catastrophes of the
seventh and eighth centuries before the present era.
Because of man's aversion to knowing his past, science has been
greatly retarded, pretending unreality to be as truth. This
explains the fury of the opposition that declared war on my
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book,
Worlds in Collision.
If the book were fantasy, would it not
have had its season and died down? it has not died down. It
survives. But scientists have not investigated my claims nor
tested the evidence presented, nor have they searched for new
evidence. Instead, scientists have chosen to oppose me and my
book in most ingenious ways, substituting name-calling and
mockery for discussing and testing. Scientists are followers of a
cult, defending dogmas with which they do not wish to part.
Scientists have proclaimed these dogmas to be established laws,
when in reality they are nothing but views, and erroneous ones at
that.
In my book
Worlds in Collision
there are footnotes which allow
the reader to check the sources of my claims. In twenty-four
years those scholars who have taken time to check my sources
have found that my quotations have not been taken out of
context. But, of course, I do not claim infallibility. Establishment
scientists, despite their proclaimed idealism, deserve to be
labeled pseudo-scientists. In science, claims are accompanied by
proof; in pseudo-science proof is omitted and any discussion that
questions the dogma is suppressed. In the discoveries of the
Space Age there is now an independent proof of the claims made
in
Worlds in Collision
and
Earth in Upheaval.
The Moon, and
Mars, and Mercury, and also other planetary bodies went
through paroxysms.
The subconscious desire of man to know his past was the basis
of progress which led to the development of science. The
aversion to accepting the truth about the past inevitably blocks
the road. Scientific efforts are directed away from the right
channels, and so science briefly progresses, and then regresses.
For a full hundred years Darwin not only advanced, but also
retarded the development of science. My work has also
produced both a positive and a negative effect. Claims have been
maintained that would not have been maintained if the scientists
had not felt obliged to contradict the iconoclastic views
expressed in
Earth in Upheaval
and
Worlds in Collision.
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SUPPRESSION AND REGRESSION
In postulating that the Earth was a planet travelling around the
Sun, Aristarchus was the precursor of Copernicus. Copernicus
realized this, because in the original preface to
De
Revolutionibus
[6] he referred to Aristarchus, but removed the
reference before the book was published in the year of his death.
Between these men are seventeen centuries yet both were
opposed by the scientific minds of their day. Mankind has the
need to live in an unreal world. Men did not wish to believe that
their planet travels through space. A moving planet might not be
safe, it could collide with something. The thought that the Earth
could collide is by itself traumatic.
No ancient scientist is considered greater than Archimedes.
Archimedes was irreverent toward his senior contemporary,
Aristarchus, for believing that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Archimedes won, and after the time of Ptolemy (second century
of the current era) the victory was complete. Science accepted
this untruth, not just for centuries, but for more than a
millennium.
Despite the fact that Aristotle did not profess beliefs which in
any way resembled the beliefs of Christianity, a strange
symbiosis developed between the writings of Aristotle and the
Bible. Aristotle was the authority that dominated Christian
thinking for many centuries. Copernicus' theory was rejected, not
because of the Bible, but because of Aristotle.
In this century there was great opposition when I proposed that
the Earth had nearly collided with other planets. Science, too, is
torn between the desire to know and the aversion to knowing.
But my revelation was really just a rediscovery, the evidence
was always there. I did not read any hidden texts, the words
were clearly written, they were shouting at me from all
bookshelves.
The Darwinian Revolution was also a regression. Disturbing
evidence was ignored; it was as if he worked with closed eyes.
Darwin proposed that only the fittest survive. He believed that,
through competition alone, the first unicellular bodies could
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evolve into more complex life forms, as different as man, worm,
and bird. Darwin did not know about mutations.
His notebooks from the only field trip he ever undertook contain
descriptions of cataclysmic disruptions. He wrote that nothing
less than the shaking of the entire frame of the Earth could result
in the mass annihilation of life forms that he observed. On the
continental scale he observed that life forms, large and small,
were extinguished or decimated from Tierra del Fuego to the
Bering Strait. Darwin did not accept the implications of the
evidence that he saw with his own eyes.
The Darwinian Revolution was the rebirth of Aristotle, whose
ideas had lost ground, if not at the time of the Renaissance, then
in the Age of Enlightenment. Even in the Age of Enlightenment
men espoused ideas of a peaceful earth. Jean Jacques Rousseau
believed that there was a happy beginning to the human race and
that because of man's sinfulness, he has become what he is
today. That paradise existed in the past is another dream.
In the days of Rousseau and Voltaire there lived in France a man
whose name is probably not familiar to most of you. He was an
engineer named Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. He wrote an article
on the Deluge for the great French
Encyclopédie,
published by
d'Alembert and Diderot. Boulanger also wrote
l'Antiquité
d
evoilé par ses usage's, a work in several volumes. Voltaire and
Rousseau and other great names pale in my eyes before Nicolas
Boulanger. At my request, Dr. Mullen [7] was kind enough to
bring two of these volumes from the Princeton University
Library. I have displayed them on the floor as material evidence
of Boulanger's work.
I discovered Boulanger rather late in my research. First I read
about him in Stecchini's paper in the September 1963 issue of
the
American Behavioral Scientist
[8]. Although I still have to
study Boulanger's work carefully, his findings surprise me
greatly. I realized that he was the precursorof Freud, and in
many respects of myself. I do not know what led Boulanger to
his discovery. He writes mostly of the Deluge, but not only does
he realize that there were catastrophes, he draws some
conclusions about the mental effects they caused.
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The recognition of past cataclysms opens new vistas in all fields
of inquiry, even in morals and ethics. I wish to draw your
attention to a book by Pitirim Sorokin [9] in which he discussed
calamities like world wars and famine. He discovered that two
reactions occur. One reaction is to help (a humanitarian
reaction), and the other reaction is to harm (a destructive
reaction); he saw evidence for this in the excesses of the Russian
Revolution. Sorokin's idea of dichotomy is illustrated on the one
hand by the way the escapees from Egypt interpreted the noises
caused by the folding and twisting of strata, noises of the
screeching Earth described also by Hesiod - the Israelites heard
in them a voice giving ethical commands.
Elsewhere on the tortured Earth, other races responded
differently: Compare Olympus to Sinai. The Homeric scandals
on Olympus occurred at the time of the cataclysms; this was the
other reaction. Another example comes from Heraclitus
10
, who
compared the different descriptions of the Pantheon by Plato and
by Homer. We see then, past and present, both reactions to
calamity.
PLANET GODS
The inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of
man's aggression. Astronomy preoccupied all ancient peoples -
in Mexico, in Babylonia, and elsewhere. It was the dominant
occupation of the sages. The ancients watched the planetary
bodies because they were afraid that another disaster would
occur. Astrology has its beginning in the deeds of the planets.
Many of the liturgies since antiquity are echoing in catastrophic
events. Around the world peoples of all faiths worshipped astral
bodies. Great temples were erected to the planetary deities. The
Parthenon was built to honour Athene. In Athens, a few columns
of the temple to Zeus are still standing. Temples were erected to
Jupiter in Baalbek, and to Amon (Jupiter) in Karnak. The
worship and sacrifices to the various deities of the past have the
same genesis, as do the establishment of priesthoods and priestly
rituals, many of which are still used. Even in the Christian era,
temple architecture has memorialized these events. The Gothic
buildings of the Middle Ages refer to unconscious catastrophic
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memories and to lingering mnemes of terrifying apparitions
exemplified by the dreadful figures of Notre Dame. The greatest
feat of engineering of the past, the great pyramids of Egypt, were
royal shelters against possible repetition of catastrophic events.
In his
Despotisme orientale
, Boulanger discusses those ancient
kings and tyrants who behaved as if they wished to be regarded
as earthly equivalents of the planetary gods. Only rarely did they
desire to be called sun gods because the Sun was never the
supreme deity. Today, we find this strange because we do not
recognize the catastrophic history of our Solar System.
Macrobius, a Latin author of the fourth century identified Jupiter
of mythology and of religion as the Sun. Modern authors do the
same thing when they say that Amon was the Sun, or Nergal was
the Sun; they were not. Around the world mythology and
folklore testify that some ancient terror underlies the origin of
many social institutions. The sacred prostitution of the past
became the secular prostitution of today. Warfare has its origin
in the same terror. As the ancient Assyrian kings went to war
they compared the destructiveness of their acts to the
devastations caused by the astral deities at the time of upheavals.
In creating symbols, men were depicting battles in the sky; the
Mogen David of ancient Israel or even of Israel of today the
five-pointed star of Communist Russia and China, and of the US
Armed Forces are emblems of Athene-Pallas. The dragon, be it
Chinese, Assyrian or Mexican, or the dragon fighting with St.
George or with Michael the archangel originates from the
apparition first seen on the celestial screen in the days of the
Passage of the Sea. All Mayan, Olmec and Toltec monuments
and temples are constructed to Quetzalcohuatl, the planet Venus
and other planetary bodies which superceded in their dominance
one another in planetary ages. Quetzalcohuatl is omnipresent in
Yucatan, a winged serpent or dragon, exhaling burning water or
naphtha.
WAR
The after-effects of what took place millennia ago do not lose
their grip on the human race. If anything, the trend continues and
accelerates. Wars made by irrational nations led by irrational
governments have been recurring since the time of the Assyrian
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kings, and have been growing in scale as preparations for war
continue. in the last century the Russian philosopher Vladimir
Solovyov recognized that almost all technology for peaceful uses
had firstly originated and developed to serve destruction. The
awarding of the Nobel Peace prizes has been of no help in
preventing military conflicts.
Freud exchanged with Einstein famous letters on the subject of
'Why War?' - but he resigned himself to the unavoidability of
human carnage. Due to the persistent urge for destruction in
man, already early in the development of his theory he realized
that traumatic experiences, whether of physical or psychological
nature, cause amnesia in the individual; and further, as years
passed, he realized that the victim of traumatic experience,
whether still on is conscious mind, or submerged in oblivion'
urges the victim to live once more through the traumatic
experience, and sometimes, more often than not, making
somebody else the victim. But Freud thought that man was
reliving the regularly-repeated drama of the murder of the father
by his grown-up sons which occurred in the caves of the Stone
Age. Freud believed that an indelible vestige of this prehistoric
trauma lurks deep within the human mind, and as years passed
he came to the thought that possessed all his thinking. Racial
memory of some traumatic experiences dominates man and
society to the extent that the human race in his diagnosis, lives in
delusion. But he did not know the true traumatic nature of the
historical past, namely, the outburst of wantonness in nature
itself, and so he insisted that each individual relives the
catastrophes of the past, which he believed to be the murder of
the father, the Oedipus complex. He opposed the biological view
of his day, and of today, too, and insisted that this imprint was
transported through the genes from one generation to the next.
He did not come to know the true nature of the Great Trauma -
born in the Theogony or battle of the planetary gods with our
Earth, brought more than once to the brink of destruction - which
was the fate of Mercury, Mars, and Moon. Freud died in exile
from his home, when a crazed worshipper of Wotan was
preparing another Götterdämmerung. The great riddle unsolved,
Freud closed his eyes when the hakenkreutz (another ancient
emblem) carrying troops marched into flaming Poland.
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Another generation rose since the end of World War II. The
technology of destruction since the days when a mushroom rose
over Hiroshima has advanced tremendously. The human urge to
repeat the traumatic experiences of the past did not subside, but
grew, and he who tried to reveal them was reviled. How many
atomic submarines have been built? How many mushroom
clouds can be produced? In how many ways can we destroy all
life on this Earth? A Damocles sword hangs over the human
race. The planets have finally retired into peaceful coexistence.
But mankind, though not in the center of creation, still, in its
optimal place, is a pandemonium of races and nations, while the
blueprint of Armageddon is on the drawing boards, and the
arsenal to incinerate this globe and degenerate whatever
population will survive is growing from day to day. The
adversaries on both sides of the Atlantic, with many small
nations emulating them are as if living with the urge to se . e
again the unchained elements in a nuclear multi-head explosion
over every locality of the Old and New Worlds.
I feel that I must speak out on this subject whenever and
wherever I can. We are in a race, and I do not know if I can
help, but I must try.
Unfortunately my attempt to cure the mental illness which
afflicts mankind cannot use the methods of good psychiatry. You
cannot put the human race on the couch. You cannot expect to
cure using blunt statements about the past. Without preparation,
without giving the patient a chance to prepare himself, you
cannot slowly release from his subconscious mind the necessary
recognition of the traumatic past. Above all others, the scientific
community has experienced great paroxysms, and reacted in fury
against the disclosures of a modern book.
The price for my revelation has been high, but what choice did I
have? The enemy is time. I conclude with a verse which is not
my own, and I don't remember it exactly, but the hour is late,
and I will repeat it:
We are in a race with the Reaper
We hastened, he tarried, we won.
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I wish I could hope that it will be that way, and not the other
way around.
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Notes (Cultural Amnesia)
1.
Dr. Velikovsky has previously published
Oedipus and
Akhnaton
, the reconstruction of a human tragedy, at the end of
the house of Akhnaton, with the help of Greek legends,
Earth in
Upheaval
, discussing paleontology and geology,
Ages in Chaos,
Volume one
and
Peoples of the Sea
, the concluding volume,
discussing archaeology and ancient sources, and
Worlds in
Collision
, discussing folklore and mythology.
2.
Which is the astronomical way of indicating 687 B.C.
3.
See
Worlds in Collision
(Doubleday, 1950) page 122,
footnote 10; (Pocket Books, 1977), page 134; (Abacus, 1972),
Page 127, footnote 3. Because of their importance Velikovsky's
books will be cited for three editions. The footnotes refer in the
following order to the hardcover Doubleday edition, the new
Pocket Books edition, and the Abacus Paperback edition.
4.
Velikovsky is suggesting that the Ouranos referred to in
myths might be the planet Uranus, rediscovered in the eighteenth
century by William Herschel, or the planet Neptune,
rediscovered in the nineteenth century by Adams and Leverrier.
5.
Earth in Upheaval
(Doubleday, 1955), pages 71-72,
footnote 5, (Abacus, 1973), pages 64-65; (Dell, 1968), page 75;
(Pocket Books, 1977), pages 66-67.
6.
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
was published in
1543
.
7.
Dr. William Mullen, Hodder Fellow in the Humanities,
Princeton University.
8.
"The Inconstant Heavens", pages 19-35,43-44; this article
has been reprinted in de Grazia, Juergens, and Stecchini eds.,
The Velikovsky Affair
(University Books, 1966) pages 80-126.
9.
Man and Society in Calamity (Greenwood Press, 1968).
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10. Heraclitus, author of
The Homeric Allegories
(1st century
present era) not to be confused with Heraclitus of Ephesus.
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2
THE PALAETIOLOGY OF FEAR AND
MEMORY
Alfred de Grazia
Department of Politics
New York University
Palaeo-anthropology has reached a stage of agitation perhaps
unparalleled since the nineteenth century discoveries of
palaeolithic man. Serious questions of chronology have been
raised. On the one hand, it appears that hominids have been long
on Earth, perhaps even five million years by certain radiodating,
and have used tools for just as long a time. On the other hand,
the end of the ice Age has been pushed ever nearer to the
present, and with it many of the early creations of man, so that
speculation upon a neolithic revolution of mind and culture
flourishes. That is, human nature is proposed both to be
extremely old and extremely young.
A second prominent question concerns the nature of invention.
increasingly we understand that every human "invention" or
practice that is a "first" cannot be called first if only because
every invention is a complex of usages requiring a species that is
functioning holistically. An elaborated club requires a tool for its
making, a sense of design, a visualized succession of futures in
which it may be used, a notion of property, a hierarchy of force,
and a directed memory. Add a firehearth with its myriad
implications and you have a culture.
If palaeochronology is correct even in general, and I am not sure
that it is a
Homo
of hammer and fire appeared exceedingly early.
But, if so, then why the hundreds of thousands or millions of
years of stagnation? If a club, why not a panzer division and an
automated whaling expedition in the next two thousand years
thereafter?
It may be that the datings are quite wrong. Or perhaps
Homo
has
undergone sharp genetic change on one or more occasions in the
middle of his long course of life. Or maybe some set of profound
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experiences propelled him into the modernity of the neolithic
age.
Without addressing itself to the first two possibilities, this paper
argues the last of them. It maintains that mankind was goaded to
leap into modernity by a series of horrendous environmental
changes. These events of the sky and earth closed down the age
of palaeolithic hammer-plus-fire people and introduced modern
humans in their stead. A furious socialization and inventiveness
possessed an already acculturated people.
The transformation, according to this theory, must have
forcefully involved as leading elements in its development the
systems of human fear and human memory.
PART I
FEAR
By our third year of life we are already communicating
catastrophic experiences to others. If we have not yet been
catechized by religion, we may have learned to chant of
catastrophe by means of fables. We may have heard repeatedly
of Chicken-Licken (alias Chicken Little, Henny-Penny, "The
End of the World"), and we wish to join the procession of
animals that hope to be sheltered from the falling sky, seeking
the protection of the king (authority), fearful lest the fox (a
wicked force) eat us up in his cave, or hopeful that an owl
(knowledge) will tell us that we are only imagining disaster
(dreaming). This same story, with some variations, is found in
many cultures. The same mental process and types of output are
found everywhere. People sense fear, share it with others, and
treat its symptoms by means of fable.
A FIRST APPROXIMATION
Psychology has long tried to pinpoint a "primal fear" or "primal
anxiety" that seems to be born with us or infects us soon
thereafter. The fear seems to originate very early; else why
would we as infants be so eager to enter upon our therapy
through chant and fable? Such therapy appears to be attachable
to any object, outside or within the developing organism.
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By "attachable" (or should we use the term "displaceable"?) and
by object," we mean that early fear can be stimulated by, and
subjectively perceived as caused by, a hand, bottle, spasm, sight,
noise, lifting or sinking in space, or whatever may occupy,
overlay or reinforce certain neural paths that course among our
glands, brains, and organs; the fear appears to have a preexisting
depository somewhere within us. It has been observed to be
more intense among infants who were not handled, than among
those who were moved about and played with.
Close observers of the experiences of infants can see that a
practically undifferentiated combination of organs may respond
to stimuli in all major categories of life thrusts. The earlier in life
that stress is applied the more quickly the total development of
the organism. Stress stimulates the organism's hypothalamus and
pituitary glands, as well as its spinal cord and celiac plexus, and
the aforesaid glands release hormones (ACTH) into the blood
stream that activate the adrenal cortex to release more hormones
that accelerate metabolism. The system functions a few days
after birth. In these senses, there is no reason to deny the
assertion that primal fear may be hereditary or even pre-natal.
We may categorize the life-thrusts as centered upon control of
the environment, affection, and well being (ingestion and
excretion); that is, operationally, reactions to stimuli and stress
can be placed into these three groupings. Later on, these
categories branch out: well-being ramifies into purely organic
health and the symbol system connected with it and into far-
flung-economic systems with their symbols; affection spreads
over an area of sexuality, respect, and altruism; control is refined
into power and knowledge. The categories need not be defined
here, but are merely illustrative. Behavioral patterns (and
institutions) emerge from, cluster about, and fixate upon such
categories. For example, infantile sexuality gives rise to
sexuality, then to family control, or control of attendant's
response, also to dominance, and to hierarchy - with all of their
differentiated patterns from place-to-place and person-to-person.
"No two snowflakes are quite alike." Here, too, we need not go
farther.
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ANIMAL AND HUMAN FAILURES ALIKE
Primal fear, we must admit, is observed in animals, whether
infant or adult. When we say of a person "she jumped like a
startled doe" we begin metaphorically what could be a minute
comparison of all respects in which mammals respond to events
with fearful behavior. We go to accounts of disasters, which may
be read into fossil palaeontology or come from histories of
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods. We note such facts
as, or see that, animal and humans flee alike and together into
caves to avoid flood and fire. Mammals, like people, become
desperate with hunger, become aggressive and seductive with
sexual lust, and learn to exploit their environments.
But now we come to that well-worn concept: "the range of
response." The range of searching and reacting is very much
greater among humans, marvelously greater, and even
"qualitatively" greater. Human behavior is immensely expanded;
furthermore, by imagination in the "hall of mirrors" that
symbolism furnishes.
We discover that we have large brains. We think, "Here is the
source and solution. The one unique trait of humans!" Our vastly
superior range of behavior results from a capability for cerebral
reflexes on a grand scale. We can gain more impressions, store
more, classify them more flexibly and finely, and use them more
logically to solve problems.
Our triumph is short lived. The human of today does not have a
larger brain than do various fossil skeletons that were unearthed
in an environment of deprivation and squalor comparing badly
with the hives of bees and the houses of beavers. Yet this style
of life lasted for many thousands of years. For that matter, a
number of living groups and members of groups seem to be only
one step ahead - largely in symbolism we mark - from the
mammals around them. Moreover, we must admit that we cannot
solve the most important problems that beset all animals - food,
death, and survival of the species. We have solved them "in our
minds" perhaps, but perhaps the animals have, too.
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Actually we must beg the question to proceed further. We have
to say "Granted our preferences, we are the best animal on earth
to achieve them." That is, we like what we like. Very well. What
is it that we wish to achieve. And then we say what any animal
would say if it could speak: "Self-fulfillment! We wish to be all
that we might be. That is, healthy, loving, and wise. With such
variations of these themes as our species can enjoy."
Well, then, where is the place for primal fear in this scheme of
things? Primal fear is the uncomfortable feeling that we are
about to be denied some or all of all that we want, beginning
with life itself, the prerequisite to health and all else. We have
never been successful as a group in becoming healthy, loving
and wise. Our failures in each generation, and the failures of
those who train us, make us fearful.
With these obvious statements of fact, have we not solved the
problem of the origin and transmission of primal fear?
THE DRIVE TO FAIL
We wonder how far this simple solution has carried us. The
application of invention and administration to human societies
has certainly erased fears, at some times and places and in
certain areas of life more than in others. We write books, build
skyscrapers, land on the Moon, muster armies, plough the land
deeply and neatly with machines, and compound billions of
aspirin tablets. True, we suspect that some of these activities and
others as well have only in part to with becoming healthy,
loving, and wise. Often our activities seem to resemble a dog
chasing its tail, or more abstractly, they suggest a vicious cycle.
We suspect that a great deal of what we do, of what we achieve,
of how we fulfill our desires to be healthy, loving, and wise -
indeed all of our history shows it - is
not
to become healthy,
loving, and wise, but just the opposite: to suffer, to hate, and to
suppress knowledge! We choose very often the bad, if not for
"us" then for "others" (a mere non-psychological and pragmatic
distinction); we make the bad look good; diabolism, in a word.
We can identify this diabolism, the evil principle of life, as a
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product of the primal fear. Possibly Freud's "death - instinct" can
be indicated as its product, as well.
How do we operationalize the concept "fear"? How many stones
of the Cathedral of Notre Dame were laid by fear? Whatever
stimulates in an organism reactions of chemical and perceived
malaise, avoidance, and hostility produces fear. The greater the
scope and intensity of the stimulus (which we may call
deprivation, also) the greater the fear and anxiety.
The word "fear" more precisely denotes any one or a
combination of chemical and behavioral activities of the
organism the sheer enumeration of which would consume pages.
The list grows, as more and more activities may be observed, in
combination with others, to be prompted to some degree by fear.
B.F. Skinner, for instance, once he acquired a keen perception of
aversive training in all aspects of life, was driven to total
reconstruction of society, a Walden II, where alone may all the
interacting primitive mechanisms of society be avoided and
substituted for by positive reinforcement of desired behavior.
Both stimulus and response may be social and/or personal, and
either or both may be conscious and/or unconscious. Much of
the time we find ourselves telling someone, "You don't know
what's bothering you," which is all very well, provided that we
know what is bothering him and can prove it. Down, down, we
are led - and back, back!
FEAR STORAGE
Fear is stored as a potential response. The word "stored" is
convenient but we cannot mean by it that a fear-bank is located
somewhere in the organism like a slab of fat or a quart of blood.
Presently, a fear-bank is a fear-capacity, that is: a capacity of a
system to respond chemically and behaviorally faster, more
intensively, and more extensively to a fear-producing stimulus,
plus a corresponding capacity to perceive fear-stimulating events
in the environment ever more finely.
The response is physically connected with objects identified by
the person as the same or similar. But the identifications are not
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easy and automatic. The logic is not according to a rational "is"
but is experiential. One proceeds analogically and culturally.
One is subject to the categories of mind, gland, and anatomy in
general in matching a personal historical event of fear with a
present cause now of fear. But to these are added social or
"racial" or collective fears. One is subject simultaneously to
indoctrinated matching of the historically experienced fear with
the presently socially identified cause of fear which may or may
not be (for many reasons) the "true" cause of the present fear
here and now.
Suppose that we call the emotional load of historical and
catastrophic and present fear the "affect" of fear, thinking of it as
a kind of fear-depot. In what way, if any, may we say the stored
affect is hereditarily transmitted, as well as socially transmitted?
If we exclude chemical, radioactive and viral materials from the
term "history," a historical experience appears to be incapable of
having a genetic impact on an organism that is yet to be
conceived. The organism is unaffected at conception by the
impact and effect of historical experience. A child is not
frightened by a bomb that his mother heard long before he was
conceived, but by stories of its fearfulness.
Still the organic setting of the fear mechanism is inherited.
Therefore, one's personal history, whatever the person
experiences that is structurally analogous to the ancestral social
experience will be organically experienced with
The same types of symptoms and affect. In other words, a maze
of sensible and intelligible tracks is set up genetically, and is the
natural system to be used for analogous experiencing by the
person or for training purposes by the group as it organizes
ancestral group experiences (as symbolized) and new future
experiences (as interpreted). (This general condition varies
within unknown limits according to individual constitutional
sensitivities to fear.)
PRINCIPLES OF THE FEAR SYSTEM
We may recall now several principles that have occurred to us
thus far:
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a) The areas of fear coincide with the areas of life (the ubiquity
of fear).
b) The greater the scope and intensity of the deprivation over the
areas of life, the greater the fear (the fear/deprivation
covariation).
c) The greater the fear, the greater the storage of fear-affect
(fear-bank).
d) Any new experience of deprivation calls into being as
response the affect that is anatomically and socially determined
to be analogous (the analogous fear-response).
e) The greater the stored affect, the greater the new fear. (The
over-response to fear).
Now I would suggest another principle that is not, in my opinion,
difficult to accept:
f) The banking of fear-affect (of anatomical and/or social
origins) is not confined strictly to a set of analogous areas of
responses (the displacement of fear).
For example, anatomically there is no reason to believe that
there is a distinctive mechanism in the adrenal medulla that
regulates the flow of the potent drug, adrenaline, according to
prescriptions marked neatly "to be used for sexual use only" or
"use only in case of food deprivation," or "reserved for
screaming bombs." The neural instruction to the gland is general:
"Emit a little" or "Emit a lot," and there follows various juggling
measures by other organs to handle the flow of adrenalin,
hopefully advancing the body to a postulated, fictional
"equilibrium".
The brain, especially the "higher" control centers in small crises
(as perceived) and the "lower" control centers in great crises (as
perceived), does manage to institute some kind of "cause-effect"
or "stimulus-logical response" relation. So do many other more
archaic elements of the body.
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However, we must add another principle:
g) The greater the stored fear-affect and the greater the present
experienced deprivation, the greater the overflow of responding
affect that had been stored in remote "illogical" "unanalogous"
life-areas (Excessive fear-displacement).
Take, as one of many available illustrations, the expression,
"When he thought he was about to die, his whole life flashed
before him." In a most traumatic experience, it may occur that
every area of life becomes instantly relevant, connected, and
impressed. Specialization, in fear as in other areas of experience,
must surrender to generalization in the face of crisis. Crisis
mobilizes: psychologically, organically, and socially.
FEAR OVERLOAD AND FAILURE
Once more, we recall something already said, in order to fashion
yet another principle. We said that historically humankind has
been, if not a failure, then only a restricted success. The more
marvelous and burgeoning our creations, the more reason we are
given to believe that the very exuberance of our endeavors is
itself a fatal sign that we have achieved little in the eternal
struggle against fear. We have not become healthy, loving and
wise.
h) Humankind has stored up too much fear to become healthy,
loving, and wise (unhappiness through fear overload).
Wherever one is pricked by fear, the fear generalizes and is
related to other areas of life. One does not have to experience on
"one's own account" more than a minimum of fear-inducing
experience. Most known societies have elaborate institutional
and artistic machinery for building and reinforcing fears without
the need of experiencing deprivations beyond the minimum.
Societies carry an over-load of fear, which impresses generation
after generation; hence individuals suffering frustrations must
ordinarily respond with fears in a generalized rather than
specialized, causally-connected way.
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If this is true, what areas of life are to be held responsible for
providing humankind with its most excruciating and enduring
terrors? Would it be in the struggle for food? In the search for
love? In the understanding of oneself and nature? Or what?
Let us speculate upon the history of these needs since the age of
the hominids. Every single being who has ever lived has had a
number of crises or encounters, many of them deprivational and
frustrating, in all three areas. But meanwhile' in most cases, he
has enjoyed certain indulgences, and he has seen that others,
enjoying momentarily either better or worse experiences, are not
overly agitated by his personal experiences. Whether the human
race is five million or fifteen thousand years old, a continuous,
varied lifetime of experiences has enveloped the individual
human being.
At all times deprivation result in structural personal
affect-deposits and social deposits. For example, the birth throes
are agonizing for mother and infant. The anatomy registers the
terror upon the infant for life, with some variance of intensity.
The society encourages the mother and attendants to reduce
infant pain as much as possible, and helps the mother by various
rites and medicines through her agony. So with diseases, famine,
sex rivalry, accidents, and conflicts.
If human existence had been nothing but these frustrations,
would man be what he is today? No, we say. For he has suffered
these always as an ordinary sensitive mammal. Could they have
accumulated bit by bit in our customs and institutions to give us
ultimately an overcharge of fear? Again we point to a largely
unprogressive, artless primeval history.
But add now the experiences of local earthquakes, local storms,
local volcanic eruptions and occasional meteorite falls. Would
these be enough to create a person who in several thousand
years moved from idiot to savant? Since these, too, have been
among the eternal fund of human experiences, we must
a priori
deny them major effect.
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CATASTROPHIC FEAR
However, consideration of these shocking experiences suggests
that if a much greater disaster were visited upon the human
species, inflicting severe deprivations of food, light, air, water,
heat, affection, property, and control, extending simultaneously
to practically all humans and animals, and suggesting in many
ways an immense life force in human and/or animal form, then
such a disaster would bring about a massive social fear which,
on top of the uniformly accruing fears, might overload the total
fear-affect-bearing capacity of the human race for thousands of
years. That a series of such disasters occurred in the period of
the dawn of civilization seems to be highly probable. We may
cite here not only the striking documentation published by
Immanuel Velikovsky from religious myths and secular histories
of the earliest times, but also the researches of the Renaissance
and Enlightenment scholars such as Giordano Bruno and
Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, surveys of Claude Schaeffer on the
comparative stratigraphy of the Near and Middle East, and the
ever-mounting geological evidence of widespread destruction in
Holocene times, much of which was also compiled by
Velikovsky. Humanity was literally born in an epoch of
disasters, and it may be correct to say that man was created by
disasters.
That is to say, by principle:
i) Natural catastrophes must be the origins of the overload of
fear-affect that has driven man to create most of his goods and
evils, his arts, and his institutions (the catastrophic fear).
And, if we accept this idea, we place it with our other principles,
and say:
j) The super-experience, the super-fear, spills its affect upon
other areas of life and makes them develop in multitudinous
ways, all of them under the influence, the style, and the
behavioral conditioning of the primal fear (the cultural ubiquity
of the catastrophic fear).
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This catastrophic element, the "Disaster-factor," overruns all
other life areas and affects them all. The catastrophic "D-factor"
becomes the most widely employed model for the design of life -
of religions, of governments, of transportation and commerce, of
sex practices and of conflict and war. That it has been until now
the least obvious and the most unconscious of human
fear-burdens does not negate its presence or diminish its
quantity. Its deeply buried and fully generalized character
contributes to the difficulty of discovering and elaborating its
origins and operations.
Since D-affect has been most
pronounced in
the development of
affects in all value areas of life, the accumulated D-affect is
greater than any single source of fear and continues to supply
chemicals and behaviors when these other sources are
stimulated. In this sense, then, a person today responds to the
disasters of several -thousand years ago. There have been 77
reproductive generations of 33 years each since the last
catastrophe located by Velikovsky in -686. Calculated as
Memorial or Mnemonic generations of 60 years, that is, the
years between a child and an old story-teller of the clan, the
elapsed time is 44 generations. One is responding today to
D-events of 44 generations of collective remembering and
reburial. One does so even when one (or an intimate observer)
would claim that he is responding only to fear of assault, rape,
thunder, hunger, punishment or whatever.
A "D-event" is both
general
and
terrible
. It supplies these two
qualities. Because it is general, it can be associated with
all
affect-types
, that is, with areas of health, affection, knowledge,
etc. Because it is terrible it provides a substantial part of the
"D-analogous affect" stored in relation to such affects. Thus
ordinary behaviors, then, cannot be natural; they are already
constructed of D-affect and loaded with D-associations that are
drawn upon habitually. Sex is not sex; commerce is not
commerce; war is not war. They are all this at a higher level of
affect. Very ancient catastrophes at the dawn of human nature
continue to have pronounced effects upon a very wide range of
behaviors making it difficult even to speak of a pure event in
love, commerce, conflict, and science.
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PART II
MEMORY
Fear stands in a reciprocal relation to memory. Each exists in the
other and builds upon the other. Memory is more than an
instrument of fear. It is created by fear and yet alone makes
possible the constructive (destructive) elaboration of fear.
The science of remembering and forgetting - what shall it be
called - mnemonology? its scope ranges from the ridiculous to
the sublime; from the "'psychopathology of everyday life," as
Freud put it, to the "'collective amnesia" that Velikovsky asserts
of ancient catastrophes and that German educators observe as
they try to teach the history of Nazism. it must deal with myths
such as the Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite in Homer's
Odyssey
that mask world disasters, and with nursery songs that
mask the murders of kings.
We may quote what Katherine Elwers Thomas found when she
explored
The Real Personages
of Mother Goose:
The lines of Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue, which to
childish minds have only quaint charm of meaning, which
suggest but the gayest of blue skies and rapturous-hearted
creatures disporting in daisy-pied meadows, hold in reality
grim import. Across all this nursery lore there falls at times
the black shadow of the headman's block and in their
seeming lightness are portrayed the tragedies of kings and
queens, the corruptions of opposing political parties, and
stories of fanatical religious strife that have gone to make
world history.
For instance, the child sings of "four and twenty blackbirds,
baked in a pie." And "When the pie was opened, the birds began
to sing." Now, "Wasn't that a tasty dish to set before the King?"
The child is singing of-actual history that was never heard or
learned, of an incident in the grim struggle between the English
Crown and the Church, during which, to appease the greed and
hostility of the King, twenty-four deeds of Church land were
sealed into a pouch of dough and delivered to his castle. in old
slang, the "dough" was handed over; in new slang, the "bread."
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Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, in his
Genealogy of the
Gods
, writes of Memoria, daughter of Uranus, the first great sky
god:
In Pieria, Memoria, ruler of the hills of Eleuther, gave birth
to the Muses out of union with Zeus, son of Chronos, and
thus the forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow.
The
Theogony was
composed after -729, that is, during or after
an era of troubled skies; but it was a mythical work "reporting"
on events that had occurred hundreds and thousands of years
before.
A functional psychology rests in the quoted passage.
"Remembering" was no mere scratching of experience upon a
tabula rasa
of the mind. Memoria or Mnymosyne or
"Recollector" is the mother of history (Cleo). She has as her
progeny the means of controlling herself, for Zeus is the ordering
paternal force. There are nine (some said three or five) muses
governing the arts and sciences - dancing, music, and singing,
but also history and astronomy. They will lend human memory
its possibilities of selective attention, delusion, illusion,
abatement, extension, a shadowing and heightening -all that is
necessary to achieve that combination of remembering and
forgetting which makes social life possible on a level that is
higher than the level of non remembering or total amnesia.
Significantly, Memoria is the daughter of Uranus, who was the
grandfather of Zeus; she is no mere sprite. Her Eleuthrian Hills
are the realm of freedom, so she governs freedom.
Without further ado, we may assert that the muses were created
"by Zeus" to control the human memory so that humans should
forget their catastrophes, and in so doing get surcease from
sorrows. And that the muses will achieve this by transforming
events through art and song, through myth. The memory of
disasters is doctored "by Zeus" ultimately to brainwash humanity
and to present the new order of heaven as proper, "law abiding,"
and beautiful. Hesiod, reciting this profound truth, goes on to
describe how the muses work, reminding us of a combined team
for domestic propaganda and psychological warfare.
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As a result, all the arts and sciences have been manipulated by
the muses. What we know of the catastrophes must come from a
"natural history" - geology, biology, physics and astronomy -
and a politics, philosophy, and theology that have been censored
by the muses. Additionally, we must obtain our historical
material from myth, song, dances, and drama that were similarly
screened. It is well to insist upon this premise, whether we come
to the problem from an acquaintanceship with the natural
sciences or the social sciences. The gods, and especially
Jupiter-Zeus, who seems under various names to have developed
the patterns of anthropological psychology among most cultures,
have required this premise of us.
THE TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY AS SUCH
In a prescient passage Friedrich Nietzsche (
Genealogy of
Morals
, 1887) stabs into the heart of the matter. He asks, "How
can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one
impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind,
attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will
stay there?"
And continues, "One can well believe that the answers and
methods for solving this primeval problem were not precisely
gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and
uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his
mnemotechnics
.
'If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in; only
that which never ceases to
hurt
stays in the memory' - this is a
main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring)
psychology on earth. One might even say that wherever on earth
solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy coloring still
distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror
that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth
is
still effective
: the past, the longest, deepest, and sternest past,
breathes upon us and rises up in us whenever we become
'serious'. Man could never do without blood, torture, and
sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself;
the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of 'the
first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations
(castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all religious cults
(and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) -
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all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the
most powerful aid to mnemonics."
Unfortunately, after this amazing passage, Nietzsche collapses.
Although he immediately goes hunting for the acts that provoked
such
mnemotechnics,
he shoots a little rabbit: the primitive
forms of contract between buyers and sellers. In order to trade,
men had to keep promises; in order to ensure obligations, the
failure to repay had to be punished severely: thus the genealogy
of morals.
We are reminded of Sigmund Freud's alternate route to
fundamental error: that in the Oedipal conflict and the slaying of
the father, man achieved a (bad) conscience and the need to
justify and to punish. The Oedipus myth has much breadth and
staying power, but a still greater and universal fear had to be
imposed to support
its
recollection. And it is difficult to conceive
of anything more grand and durable than the catastrophes
attendant upon the Holocene period of Earth history.
We assert therefore that man's memory itself, the prototypical
remembering, is a consequence of catastrophe more than of any
other incidental or habitual interest of humanity.
THE RULES OF MEMORY
All memory occurs under conditions that guarantee its
imperfection. Given its mode of creation, remembering must
function compatibly. No datum will enter the mind
photographically. Rather the inputs will be screened not only by
the senses, which themselves, in large part, perceive because of
their prior social condition, but by the willingness to admit only
censored data.
This holds true, as many careful studies have shown, for the
most non-controversial and trivial kinds of experiences. Who
says
remember
says
select
; who says
memory
, says
forgetting
.
By the time of Homer, for example, numerous natural disasters
had befallen humanity. The perfect ease of the Song of
Demodokos in the
Odyssey
of Homer about an adulterous love
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among the gods attests to an approaching achievement of
"perfect imperfection": nothing of the original truth need be
omitted, so well under control are the conditions creating
imperfections. We are on our way to the climax of artistic
sublimation.
The concept of "accurate memory" is a useful fiction. We are
even compelled to say that it is a theocratic fiction. For the
content of what is remembered is in the broadest sense
religiously and politically determined. The Homerids, reciting
thousands of lines from memory, were the practitioners and
teachers of "accurate memory" as defined to protect society
against its anxieties. The ideal canons of registering and
remembering set by modern science are evidence in themselves
that "you cannot trust your memory" and "independent observers
have to confirm the same facts." But also the establishment of
scientists as a social system lays down the rules of what is to be
watched for, what is to be ignored, and what is to be distorted.
The intensity of remembering is directly proportional to the
gravity of a trauma. By intensity we mean sharpness, detail, and
durability in conscious and unconscious form. By gravity we
mean how deeply and adversely one is affected in the major
regions of his life: his physical being, his cherished ones, his
group, his wealth, his control, his beliefs about the good and the
true. Machiavelli said to the rulers: it is better to be feared by the
people than to be loved, if you cannot be both. Fear and anxiety
drove primeval humanity to invent and to organize so that it
could predict and control the world, and thereupon its fears. Fear
mixed itself early with love, and produced the continuous
ambivalence of sexuality that is exhibited throughout the most
ancient literatures.
The most intense memories are likely to occur without "willing"
them. This is understandable once we consider that no one will
seek to subject himself to the conditions that produce painful
memories. But one will try to will a pleasant memory. How
many times do people think, "I shall never forget this beautiful
sunset ... I shall always remember this kindness ... I shall never
forget this orgasm," only to lose their grasp of the memory
shortly thereafter. If a person remembers "a kind act" done to
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him long ago, it is in the context of a generally unkind and
fearful environment of acts. The most that can be done to "will"
the memory is to tie it consciously and unconsciously to
disasters and especially to institutionalize the disasters so that
the group will continuously reenact them. All great historical
religions are based upon these psychological operations.
The most intense memories are most likely to be unavailable to
the conscious mind, and to be buried in dreams and myths. In
these anxiety suppressing and anxiety-controlling mechanisms,
the dream and myth language is likely to approach as close as
possible to the ultimate universal, traumatic experiences, without
becoming unbearable: it rides on the tracks of birth throes,
sexual copulation, death scenes, violence, and conflict, including
of course, all the conventional transformations of these materials
into religious and political activities, routines, and institutions.
This "step-down" principle works on the depth of a burial, and it
brings about the selection of the next less traumatic kind of
material as the screen for the more traumatizing type.
The speed of remembering is proportional to the intensity of the
trauma. "The experience burned itself indelibly upon my mind,"
one says. A single experience is enough to cause remembering,
if it is grave. If too grave, physical collapse occurs, and no
further memorization is possible.
At the other extreme, in the absence of fear, interest, or even
recognition, an abundance of knowledge moves, as they say of
the classroom, "from the notes of the teacher to the notes of the
student without passing through the mind of either."
The phenotypes of the myth are functions of the archetypes of
the cultural personality. This is merely to say that the kind of
story told, together with its details, are characteristics of the
culture.
For instance, the Love Song of Demodokos in the
Odyssey
has
Ares and Aphrodite (Mars and the Moon) trapped in adultery by
Hephaistos, the smith god, or Vulcan, whom I identify with
Pallas Athena. I place the story in the late 7th Century before the
present era, 44 memorial generations ago. Some more ancient
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pre-Greek and proto-Greek cultures practicing group marriage
would have had to find a different plot and details to screen the
reiteration of the Moon and Mars encounter. It is characteristic
of our partially Greek-born culture, and a proof of our cultural
ancestry, that the adulterous love triangle, descended from the
Greeks, is still a favorite artistic theme.
FORGETTING
Forgetting is subject to the same rules as remembering. That is,
amnesia is activated in the same way as memory. If we think of
our list of rules of remembering, we substitute
forgetting
for
remembering
, and we get the following rules of forgetting.
Like remembering, forgetting is guaranteed to occur under all
conditions, and to be imperfect, never complete. Nor is
forgetting accurate: it is ragged, affected by many particular
causes. If the popular metaphor speaks of the stream of memory,
we can speak as well of the stream of forgetting. Forgetting
occurs proportionate to the gravity of the trauma, and forgetting
occurs without willing to forget.
The most intense forgetfulness is most likely to be available to
the conscious mind; we must admit, "we cannot recall what it is
that we have forgotten," when the thing forgotten is a matter of
grave threat to the mind.
Forgetting, too, speeds up with the intensity of the trauma.
For this reason we can believe that events that occurred perhaps
only a generation before Homer, or even in his lifetime, might
achieve a complete aesthetic screen at his hands. Let us imagine
what may have happened in a typical disaster of the "Age of
Mars," that is in the 8th and 7th centuries. I use here a model
that I have developed in a forthcoming book, but if you will, you
can transfer the scene to Krakatoa in 1883 or Nagasaki in 1945.
Immanuel Velikovsky has discovered a mass of particulars that
he has grouped and recounted in
Worlds in Collision
and
Earth
in Upheaval
.
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An ordinary person is alerted and examines the sky with a
foreboding of evil. A brilliant speck grows larger from day to
day. He is told that it has done so before, with terrible
consequences. The memory is already excited. Calendars are
studied and worked over. Oracles are consulted. All group
efforts are mobilized to control the menace: rituals of
subservience and devotion; the stricter punishment of any
suspected deviants in all areas of law and conduct; the
destruction of enemies if they can be promptly engaged; the
sacrifice of more and more valuable properties and persons.
Relentlessly the menace approaches. The sky is full of lights,
shapes and turbulences. The Earth begins to respond - to live, to
move, to split open, to smoke, to blow up strong winds, to
shriek, to take fire. Thunderbolts strike down up n all sides. Our
hero watches. He is exceedingly frightened, as are his family and
neighbors. There may be a pandemonium in which he faints or is
struck dumb; he may scramble into a temple or house or cave; he
will cover his head. The young will observe more of the scene
than the old.
The disaster occurs in successive kinds of turbulence, in all the
various destructive -forms of earth, air, fire, and water, the
primordial elements. Animals, both tame and wild, crowd in
upon people, terrified, unsavage, unhungry. Eardrums are blown
in or sucked out. Some are struck blind, others gassed. Strange
objects and life forms drop from the sky. The sky reels. The
waters gyrate madly and rush to and fro. The vista is one of
universal destruction. There is nowhere to go. Cohorts
disappear. Strangers appear. The survivors regroup after each
incident. They are partially paralyzed with fear and despair,
partly striving for survival and control.
'What god is angry?' they wonder, if they don't already know.
What other gods can they appeal to and how? What trait of a
god should they address themselves to? The most important
religious and political decisions of their lifetimes are made; the
most sacred instruments and skills of the immemorial past are
called upon in the crisis. Nothing, nobody, will ever persuade
them to behave differently, or their children, or, if they can help
it, their descendants into the eternal future.
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When the disasters subside, the survivors are crazed. They must
regroup, recollect their thoughts, and do something about the
memory. This is not a task for an astronomer sitting in the
air-conditioned hall of a giant telescope in Arizona. Not for a
sober historian. It is a task for any surviving priest-rulers: "We
have been visited by gods and messengers of gods. The figures
they strike in the sky are their various apparitions when
destructive and punitive. Good gods and spirits fight evil ones.
Our conduct displeases them: we must strengthen our
observance of rituals; purify ourselves; expiate our sins; sacrifice
ever more precious possessions; kill more enemies; control the
libertarian; guard the names by which we call a god; and remind
ourselves forevermore of the events of these days while we
watch for their eventual recurrence."
Again history is quickly subverted; indeed, it has never existed
in a value-free, fully detailed form. Instead memorial activities
are planned by the community that will register whatever
intensity on the memorial-screen is sufficient to suppress the
pain of the memory of the original experience plus all preceding
related and similar traumatic experiences.
We cannot be too explicit. No sooner is a disaster experienced
than it is remembered; no sooner remembered than it is
forgotten. All the rules about remembering are rules of
forgetting.
What? Are we to believe that memory is a forgetting and to
forget is to remember? We seem to be approaching this paradox;
if it is not indeed an absurdity. Yet, if we resolve the paradox,
we shall better understand the great mystery of myth, which bids
us remember ferociously in order the more firmly and securely to
forget.
The paradox disappears with one fact, well appreciated. The fact
is that a memory can enter the mind, but can rarely leave it.
Except by organic lesion, there is little 'forgetting.' The
biological system can scarcely throw off a memory; it can
readily manipulate it.
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What we call forgetting is the internal bookkeeping system of
memory. From conception to death and dissolution, the system
will always show a net profit. But, like many a bookkeeping
system in commerce, memorial bookkeeping has numerous ways
of casting the balance so as to conceal the surplus. It is with the
forgotten material that the mind works to create myth, art, and
hypothesis. The concept of forgetting is needed to describe the
handling of the transactions of memory that permit
consciousness, instrumentally rational conduct, and normal
behavior.
Where is the balance cast that makes these two opposites
indeed
opposite?
It is the functional machinery of the mind, where
opposites are coined according to the needs of the moment.
Whatever stabilizes the organisms's "normalcy" is chosen; and
the organism forgets conveniently. A kind of mnemonic
homeostasis occurs. But the forgotten, the fearfully forgotten,
becomes the Disaster-affect overload whose palaetiology was
discussed in the first part of this paper, with its "good" and "bad"
results.
Now the principles of the memory system may be elicited and
put before you, as was done earlier with the principles of the fear
system.
a) Human memory was created and subsequently sustained by
catastrophic D-Fear.
b) Memory potentiates the constructive and destructive
elaboration of fear out of its primeval and subsequent tracks
through the forms of the arts and sciences.
c) Memory (including history or group memory) is intrinsically
imperfect and a reciprocal of forgetting (amnesia).
d) Memory and amnesia increase directly with the severity of a
trauma.
e) Less fearful memories surface to consciousness to function as
blocks to the surfacing of more fearful memories.
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f) The act of forgetting is a human mental device that functions
unconsciously to balance the complex transactions between
repression and recall. This process may be called mnemonic
homeostasis.
THE DIFFICULTY OF D-FEAR THERAPY
Given the fear and memory systems of humanity, is there some
therapy that could rid a culture of its great fear and at the same
time maintain a distinction between "good" and "bad"? We have
seen that anatomical and social conditioners of fear and memory
complement and supplement each other, first in permitting, then
encouraging, then finally demanding the D-factor pattern of
human development. A theory of genetic traits (post-human
acquired) or of genetic mutation is probably not necessary to
explain the eternal play of good/evil, and indulgence/deprivation.
Neither, we stress, is it useful to postulate primeval economic
encounters (Nietzsche) or primeval sexual encounters (Freud) or
archetypes (Jung) as the origins of conscience and civilization.
The ways in which such encounters are carried on are the work
partly of themselves and of each other, but in large part of great
prehistoric natural disasters, involving, perforce, changes in the
conditions of the skies as well as of life on earth. Ruefully, we
must admit: The creation myths are more right than we have
been in their exposure of what made us human.
The prospects of personal therapy and public policy for the
"Disaster-affect overload" are not bright. Obviously, if our
analysis is correct, we are ill prepared to meet present fears on a
one-to-one basis. Rather, we must overreact continuously,
instead of reacting in proportion to the need to act and in relation
specifically to proven causes. Furthermore, the worse the crisis,
the greater the tendency to act non-rationally and over-generally
- to fire all guns of our ship at once in all directions.
Moreover, to our disappointment, if we observe social and
religious movements that have caught hold of the principle of
"fear-affect reduction" as a way of fulfilling people's souls and
making them happier, such as the Quakers or Buddhists, we
remark upon two unfortunate concomitant and probably
causally-related behaviors.
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